We have 20 PCs and a Linux server and need to change from Norton as it slows down our PCs by 30%. Any suggestions for another supplier at charity prices welcome. Our Linux is unprotected at the moment and a suggestion there would be welcome. We are in the UK.

Unfortunately, you're going to have a hard time finding an AV product that performs better. You may need to make some configuration changes to regain some of the performance on your PCs, but having AV protection will always affect the performance on your computers. How much depends on a number of factors, including CPU speed, disk speed and how much memory the computers have.

The Corporate versions of software may be less taxing on the computer. The new release of Symantec Enterprise Protection (Service release 3) are looking a whole lot better than before. That is, if you want to stay with Symantec.

Trend Micros' enterprise solutions are also looking good. We've deployed their newest product with great success.

Unfortunately, you're going to have a hard time finding an AV product that performs better. You may need to make some configuration changes to regain some of the performance on your PCs, but having AV protection will always affect the performance on your computers.

We have the enterprise edition and it had a bug - we had to disable practically all firewall settings to get our email to work. And this was under advice from the support. After 3 hrs of discussion with them they then asked what the product version No. was and then asked us to download the latest version which did not have this problem. Unfortunate, and was partly due to our inexperience, but left me a bit sore.

I see at techsoup W2003 server is cheap. We are in the UK. Does techsoup operate in the UK?

As an alternative approach, does the installation of something like the Cisco 5505 firewall and protection device mean that we do not need any antivirus or internet protection on the internal machines? It uses Trend Micro (I do not know if the licence for that is separate), has VPN, remote user and most of the facilities needed at this point in the network. I do wonder if this sort of device slows outside access down though?